


The Discards

by Nazadith



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Fighting the Slaughterhouse 9, Major Original Character(s), Not Brockton Bay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25749373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nazadith/pseuds/Nazadith
Summary: The Discards were a motley crew of abandoned Capes, monsters, and normal people. Each had the goal of destroying the Slaughterhouse Nine, and Cauldron finally decided the S9's usefulness had run out. This is their stories, and how they rose to fight against a team of capes almost everyone were afraid of.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. Gunslinger 1.1

The Gunslinger: Rising.

If the young man laid out on the floor, overly long arms flailing and spindly legs kicking, knew that this was the day he would start down the path to becoming a legend, he gave no indication. The boy had no idea that in, say, 10 minutes, he was going to trigger and get all those little ideas filling his head.

The boy’s name was Wheatley Chestington and he was having an awful day. This didn’t come as too much of a surprise to him, as he had been having quite a lot of those recently. Between his perpetual inability to walk in a straight line and strange obsession with the Wild West, he was one of the outcasts in his high school. Constantly accused of intoxication, mental disorders, and the occasional comment about his maternal lineage, he had heard quite a lot. What hadn’t happened often was the physical altercations. For some reason, the people at Zaitana Cove Gifted Institute thought themselves above attacking him. Perhaps it was his thick rectangular glasses. Maybe his face was too cute and cuddly to think of harming him. Whatever it was, his luck had run out today.

Wheatley was being held down by school baseball star Alexios Garcia, while the bully’s friends rifled through his backpack. Several days before graduation, right before his 18th birthday. An awful life he was having. But the worst was yet to come.

“Let me up! I won’t bother you! Please, don’t touch those,” cried the bespectacled young man, watching his replica sheriff badges get pulled out of their holding place in his bag. They gave him comfort whenever he saw them and even a little touch could calm him down. Alexios didn’t want to hear it.

“Where is it, freakbag? Where’s your phone!”

“It broke! It’s in the shop getting fixed! I don’t have it!”

Tears were rolling down Wheatley’s face. Very unbecoming for a soon to be legendary Hero. Future Wheatley would refuse to admit this day had happened to him. Present Wheatley cried like a baby as his backpack was turned over and all of his things fell out one by one.

Onto the linoleum floor went his book on Billy the Kid. On top landed the last history assignment, he’d written it on frontier justice and how Parahuman law was similar. He’d been so proud of that. The baseball cleats punched through the paper like they were walking holepunchers. All that work… gone. Textbooks fell out, his meagre lunch plopping next to it all. The possession of his that was missing was the one thing they wanted, his phone.

“You… you must have stashed it. If we can’t get it out of you here, we’ll find a way to make you talk,” he spoke low and threatening, right into the soon to be Hero’s ear, “Say boys, the batting cages are empty right now are they not?”  
At the two boys' nods, Alexios lifted Wheatley’s gangly body off the floor. Wheatley couldn’t get his feet underneath him, so one of the other thugs had to come over and help drag him. Looking back on the event, Wheatley had no idea why he hadn’t kicked more. He may have been uncoordinated, but he didn’t need much accuracy to get some lucky taps into the other boys’ sensitive bits. Instead, Wheatley had lay still and bemoaned the damages to his school supplies.

Through corridor after corridor the baseball players dragged the taller boy. Right after their end of the day classes had rung the first bell, no one was out and about. The hall monitors were on their coffee break. The stars had aligned all for one purpose: to ruin Wheatley’s life. The three boys were talking menacingly about the pain they were going to cause him, for how creepy he was. Nothing new, then. One of the boys ran ahead to grab the keys out of a locker, and then he was out under the blazing Californian sun. Just like the movies, he was going to face his fate in the heat of high noon. Wheatley knew in the moment that he would have no glorious last stand. He wasn’t sure what awaited him but it was going to be painful, and humiliating.

He’d managed to get his feet under him just in time to be brought out to the baseball field. There were high chain link fences surrounding the field, and he knew that he would never be able to make a concerted escape attempt before they caught him. Wheatley went limp, hoping that if he was heavy enough that the boys would give up on pulling him. In hindsight, it was a foolish idea from the beginning. He was a beanpole, and they did weight training as part of their whole sports thing. Foolish from the beginning.

The cage swung open. Inside was a ball machine, the kind that launch out baseballs at high speed to train players to hit. Usually they were farther away, from the very little Wheatley knew, both then and now. All he could tell was that the machine was definitely not at safety regulation distance.

While Alexios did one last impression of a villain monologue, his spare lackey retrieved a bucket of projectiles and a spare umpire mask.

“I’ll give you one last chance. Give us the phone, stay away from Julia, and we forget all about you.”

The thoughts played out in Wheatley’s mind in slow motion. He knew he hadn’t had a phone for a week, since he had bumped a businesswoman in town because of his flatfootedness. He idly wondered what she was doing in this backwater coastal dead zone. Then he tried to figure out when he’d gone near Alexios’ girlfriend and school queen Julia Simmons. Finally he realized something was terribly wrong about the situation. Say what you will about Wheatley Chestington, but before his hero career he had no danger sense.

“I don’t… I’ve never… What are you going to do with that thing? Just let me go, I won’t snitch!”

Needless to say, this agreement was not to the liking of the baseball boys. For the next several minutes, two of the boys held Wheatley out between them, and had the baseball machine fire low intensity shots at him. He couldn’t even tense up when they were becoming, because the umpire’s mask shifted his glasses out of the way and he was finding it rather hard to see anything at all. This meant that the shock factor of each ball added to the sting. Eventually they tired of his cries of pain, and left him with one ultimatum.

“The phone must be in my hand tomorrow morning, or we drag you back out here and turn it all the way up. Ninety miles an hour. No padding. You’ll learn your lesson one way or another, skeleton.”

Wheatley was completely, utterly, unrelentingly fucked. He couldn’t produce whatever mad fantasy the bullies wanted. He had no friends to defend him. He had no social standing to let him report the athletes. He lay there covered in bruises, crying for the loss of everything he had. Finally all the conditions were right. The moment where everything would change was upon him!

The first sign was the vision fading to black, and his breathing getting rather hard, and quite obviously the splitting headache as his mind tried to accommodate an eldritch horror. The next thing he knew, he had a solution to the baseball problem. His tears ceased to flow and the gears of his brain began to turn.

What would his heroes do? He needed to dust himself off, and get to building. The next day would hold a surprise for his newfound enemies. He ran back inside in his strange loping gait, grabbed his stuff, and went to the nurse’s office. He was well known in this little section of the school, so he just claimed he had another bad panic attack and could he please go home. Later Wheatley would reflect on the optimism he had had, and couldn’t pinpoint why he’d thought this would go in any way right.

\---------

Wheatley lived out of the way, about 45 minutes from school. A bus ride took about double that, plenty of time for him to figure out what in his room could be dismantled to fuel his new projects. He was going to become a cape.

He picked his way up the gravel driveway, only tripping twice, with no extra cuts or scrapes. He opened the door into the small house, and ran to his room. He had six and a half hours to tinker uninterrupted, creating his soon to be trademarked salvation. His mother would come home to an empty house and loud rock music, and think nothing of it. One of Wheatley’s main regrets was that he hadn’t talked too much to his mother before the end. He had gotten so caught up in his work that he hadn’t come out for dinner, only stopping for a brief ice bath while he rewired his video game console into a motherboard to control his new devices.

At about eleven at night, his mother knocked on the door to say goodnight to him. She’d found a sleeping teenager, metal parts scattered around the room, and backpack torn open. The sheriff badges and his antique cowboy revolvers were lying polished to a shine on the desk, with the lamp still on above them and a discarded cloth nearby. She had turned off the lamp without noticing the metal tubing poking out of the backpack’s front pocket. Wheatley wondered what would have changed if she had raised any questions about that.

The next morning, Wheatley woke up looking forward to the day for the first time in a long while. He went through the morning at high speed, downing his tea like it was a contest that would result in someone’s death. He brushed his tea and ran out the door to catch the early bus, never seeing his mother in that time. He wore his cowboy hat again, and put on his newly improved backpack

Once in school he passed through math with flying colors. When you design your own technology, pre-calculus becomes rather simple. The normal insults flowed off him like water. He knew that the world was changing, and he was going to come out the other side stronger. The boundless optimism later sickened him.

He made some excuse to the history teacher about turning his essay in, but it was the end of the year. No one cared anymore. Definitely not him anymore. He had new prospects!

As lunchtime came to an end, he fixed his sheriff badge to the front of his shirt. He waited eagerly for the bullies to come to him. He never realized that Julia Simmons was coming out of the girl’s bathrooms merely a dozen feet behind him, and that he could have just asked her what was going on with her boyfriend. A shame, truly it is.

The hallways cleared out. The baseball stars flanked Alexios as he advanced down towards Wheatley. Wheatley took one step forwards, adjusting the badge.

“Do your worst, my friends. I don’t have what you want.”

“Our worst, freak? You’re gonna die, dirtbag. We’ll make you eat your filthy words!”

Tweedledee and Tweedledum added a chorus of “Yeah!” to the background, and that was the last thing he’d heard before the ringing in his ears. It appeared that he’d been struck quite hard by Alexios’ fist. He feared that he’d miscalculated, then dismissed the idea. He was ready for anything. Future Wheatley knew that his past self was ready for nothing, but that’s neither here nor there.

Kneeling in the batter’s cage, Wheatley couldn’t help the smirk that came across his face. Now was his time to shine. The ball machine whirred to life, and the thugs held onto his shoulders.

Three short blinks sent a command to his new visor, the display popping down from his hat at the secret signal. No less than four extra hands popped out of the metal frame on his back, pushing his bullies away. The reinforcement he’d added to his real arms allowed him to link up to his head’s up display, and move faster than he thought possible. It was nothing compared to his future upgrades, but as a prototype, it went swimmingly. He caught two of the three speedballs tossed at him, and the final one broke the frame of his lower left metal arm. A spare arm scooped it up, and he tossed the pair of balls he’d caught at the baseball stars in the cage with him. Lightly of course, he was going to be a hero, but aimed at their stomachs. He struck a dramatic pose, staring off at the sun.

“You’re going to leave me alone now. I’m above this petty rivalry. I’m a hero! You can call me... the Sundance Kid”

This early into his career? He’d chosen a famous name and stuck to it. So what if it was rather awful? He was young and impressionable. If only he’d known the kind of impressions that would imprint upon his psyche in the coming months.

Alexios Garcia and his posse had backed off from bothering Wheatley. Wheatley began to wear his Balance Frame under his clothing at all times, to stop his trademark strange walk. The baseball trio had sworn to tell no one what they’d seen, but as time passed on, their tongues had loosened. Many years later, they’d made millions telling the media what they knew of Wheatley Chestington’s younger years.

Meanwhile, the Sundance Kid grew in mediocre fame, as the one hero in Zatiana Cove. There were no supervillain teams in the Cove, but there was regular crime, and the occasional travelling Cape team. It was a passover town on the way to better known San Francisco, so it occasionally felt the impact of the Elite not allowing villain operations within their kingdoms, but the Sundance Kid usually could stop those castoffs from causing much damage. Those aren’t important to the legend of the Gunslinger. What is important next in his life was the boat trip Wheatley took, several months later.


	2. Gunslinger 1.2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A solo hero finds out how weak superheroes can fight back against the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Gunslinger: Falling

Three whole months of being the lone enforcer of justice in town took a toll on a young man’s mind. It had a way of getting to your head when you had duel after duel with encroaching monsters, both of the garden variety and the more insidious ones wearing human faces. Nothing that a few well placed bullets from the Sundance Kid’s four revolvers couldn’t cure, however. He also didn’t want to hear a word about the police. They couldn’t stop anything related to the cape scene, not like his enhanced reflexes could. 

Six arms, two eyes, one badge. He was the embodiment of heroics in his quiet town. Wheatley had filled out a bit since he had graduated, doing running exercises and trying to lift weights. Tinkering had expanded his forearms, and had toned his arms, and his costume was turning out nicely. Western antique revolvers, his Balance Frame 2.0, and the badge of his office were all that made him a cape to be reckoned with. He protected his reputation by covering the upper half of his face in his improved head’s up display, attached to a good cowboy hat. He hoped his reputation would be enough to keep the troublemakers away. Since becoming a cape, Wheatley would not stand for bullies. He didn’t have to, not anymore. Unfortunately those hopes would not come true. 

The final fight of the Sundance Kid was building. He’d heard tell of a new villain in town, a blaster who shot streams of decay out of his fingers. The whole underground of Zaitana Cove had been abuzz on how desperate Deathrey had been to establish an Empire here “before it was too late.” The Sundance Kid was still trying to figure out what he was terrified of, and whether his reputation had grown that much. Looking back on it, the Gunslinger wondered how Deathrey had thought he could avoid the amount of blood that would wash through the streets of Zaitana Cove. 

For right now, the spurs he’d attached to his authentic leather boots shook and jangled as he strode down the abandoned street. Wheatley had made it more than clear where he’d be tonight, hoping to catch out the newest interloper. His backpack was still hiding his extra hands, and he was acting as if he had only the pair of guns in his hip holsters. He thought he painted a menacing figure. Later on, he’d realized it was a bit tacky. 

The moon was almost straight overhead, reflecting off the crashing waves on the beach at the end of the road. He could see the pier in the near distance. Out of a small corner shop strode a man in full black, wearing a darkened burlap sack over his head. The homemade costume of convicted killer Deathrey.

“I’ll give you one chance to leave, criminal scum,” proclaimed Sundance Kid. He unlatched his revolvers, and readied to draw, setting up a timer in his display and paying close attention to the body language of the man a hundred or so feet away from him.

“Not going to happen, cowboy. This is my place now. And I have no space for heroes here.” 

“If you won’t come quietly, then I’ll just have to bring you in kickin’ and screamin’ like the usual folk. So be it.” 

Deathrey waited a few moments, and at some unseen signal both of their abilities engaged the battle. Deathrey shot his signature beams out of his hands, and Sundance Kid popped out his spare hands and revolvers. The new arms fired shots while Sundance Kid busied himself getting out of the way of the attack. He started a roll to the side, ending behind a newspaper stand, rising and fanning the hammer of one revolver in the direction of his enemy’s legs. When it clicked empty, he crouched again. An unfortunate lamppost shriveled to dust behind the hero, while Deathrey was showered in concrete shards and began bleeding from a shot that grazed his calf.

“Warning shots, my friend. Last chance to come quietly,” yelled out the Covetown cowboy. 

“I can’t do that, lawman. You don’t know what’s coming,” came back the words of the hiding villain. He leaned out from behind a pillar and reduced a portion of a window display behind Wheatley’s cover down to sludge.

Wheatley used his spare arms to reload, and then took careful aim using his mechanical arm’s built in camera. While he stayed in cover, the upper right arm poked over the metal display case and pointed right at Deathrey’s kneecap. A little bit of frontier justice was okay here and there. Wheatley was mostly certain that the disappearance of the Jackson girl was due to the new Villain’s blast. The ashes found in her house were a good match for the way the street lamp went. 

He fired a single bullet and down went the newest man. Another easy duel. Sundance Kid 17, new Villains 2. Wheatley remembered keeping a journal, back in those days, of all the fights he had. Shame it got lost in the attack.

His frame balanced out his natural tendency to sway side to side, and gave him the coordination to not trip over the debris left by vaporized city infrastructure. Deathrey curled up holding onto his knee and letting out the keening wail of an extremely injured man. 

Wheatley kept both of his guns trained on the downed villain, as his mechanical arms pat down his body for extra weapons and other criminal paraphernalia. Oh, the poor boy wasn’t ready for what was to come. He felt all galvanized by taking down what amounted to a petty criminal with an extra lethal offensive power. He didn’t yet realize that he was still fighting the D-listers, the dregs of Villainous society. He didn’t yet realize that by tomorrow, the S-listers of Villainous society would roll over Zaitana Cove and wipe it from the map.

\--------

Wheatley rolled out of bed, stuffing his extra arms into the casing, along with all of his guns. He put them into his backpack, and stumbled his way to the closet. First went on warm clothes, and then the Balance Frame. He was all but addicted to the feeling of coordination his inventions gave him, and he didn’t think he could go back to living without it. The events of the day would prove rather quickly that he could. The cowboy hat went on his head, but didn’t look too unusually. The Sundance Kid fan club had started wearing them around town. That’s right, he had a whole fanclub. Granted it was only 6 people large so far, but they were really enthusiastic about the whole thing!

“Wheatley, registration ends in 2 hours! We’re going to miss the whales by this rate!” called Wheatley’s mother from the kitchen. 

“Coming, Brenda!” he called back. He’d started calling his mother by her first name in the sixth grade, another sign of him being forced to grow up faster than normal. He was trying to take away another thing to make fun of him for, but it hadn’t worked.

The pair of them were packed in the electric car in no time, ready to go see some whales. A two day cruise, one of the few small scale boating industries left after Leviathan had risen. Most people didn’t trust boats, so the company was on its last legs too.

The pair of them engaged in small talk all the way down the road, neither of them realizing they would never be making a return trip. Wheatley’s door was left open, and his cat gorged itself on dirty dishes he’d left lying on his desk. The Gunslinger went to visit a single time, and the cat had taken over by that time, ruling a small fiefdom of wild animals in that abandoned home.

Neither had bothered to check the news, they were opting for a techless weekend. If they had, they would have realized that a certain super villainous cape team was spotted on their way past this town, and they wouldn’t have left the house that day. 

As it was, the pair of unsuspecting would-be whale watchers parked their car by the pier, ironically only a street over from where Deathrey was captured the night before. They got out of their car, and Wheatley took off his glasses to wipe off some condensation. He could blurrily see Brenda excitedly flagging down the company man on the store front, waving her brochure at him. The man’s bright pink hawaiian shirt stuck with Wheatley in later days, the color staying in his mind. He would always remember the blob of color right before it blossomed in spurts of red, covering the slightly overweight man as he took in the energy of the woman coming towards him. His back was to the glass doors of his storefront when Shatterbird’s song hit. 

All up and down the street, display windows broke apart into shards and began to roll towards the Pacific Ocean like a tsunami. It was almost beautiful, in its own way. Undulating waves of tiny motes of light, crashing off each other at speeds faster than any human could reproduce. The sunlight played off the colored glass from an unfortunate art store, and the translucent shards gave mass to the ocean of color. 

This was registered in the first ten seconds of the song reaching Wheatley and his mother. The next several moments were a blur of pain and impact, as Wheatley tackled his mother and curled his lanky body, finally good for something, around her. He trusted his tinkertech to hold up against the onslaught. There was nothing to be done for the company guide. Scraps of his shirt were blowing free in the wind like cherry blossoms. 

Wheatley rose, and pinned his sheriff badge to his chest. A secret identity wouldn’t mean much if they were dead. He rotated it three times, deploying the visor and his extra arms. His real arms were bleeding from several different places, and most likely unusable. That was alright for him, he had extras. 

The beach had the top layer blasted away, and the sand was beginning to swirl, mixing in with the exploded glass. It was extremely lucky for Wheatley that his glasses had been off, but his visor could only make up for so much. He would have to hope that his weapons systems hadn’t been hit too badly by the song, and that they would stand up to a free fire test. 

As his ears readjusted, Sundance Kid began hearing the screams. The beach shoppers were running to the pier, leaving many bodies behind. It was like a horde of zombies, each were mindlessly running along, all injured and dripping blood. There were calls of “Get to the boat” and “The ship!” ringing out across the street. 

Sundance Kid’s mind caught up with him. The cruiseliner they were meant to take and whale watch upon was still docked at the end of the pier. He just had to help the common people of his town get onto the ship, and keep the Slaughterhouse Nine out. 

“Brenda… Mom. You have to get up. You need to get out of here.” 

His mother groaned, and rolled over. She seemed shocked to see the local Hero standing over her in her son’s clothing. 

“Wheatley… what are you doing? You’re not a hero!”

“I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be Mom, fighting for what’s right. Just like you taught me. Get up, and start walking to the boat. I’ll keep you safe.”

There were people running from the houses further in the town, chancing the beaches to possibly get out of town as fast as possible. Some stopped when they saw Sundance Kid, but most of them kept running.

“You’ve got no chance!”

“They’re coming, they’ve already killed their way to Waternut Street!”

“Crawler is on Ninth and heading this way!”

“Someone help us, where are the heroes?”

Wheatley made one fatal, fatal, misstep. He thought he was a greater hero than he was. He thought he was ready for the greatest monsters in the United States. He wasn’t.

“I’ve got this Mom. I’ll hold them back, and join you on the ship,” stated the Sundance Kid, tightening his Balance Frame. He had to hope that the onboard computer could handle most of the movement, he couldn’t see a thing. All there was around him were blurs. He could see something in the sky moving westward, with a lot of moving parts. He idly set one of his arms to fire up at that, it could be Shatterbird. The report of his custom made revolver made his ears ring, but he was used to it. The other guns were aimed down so he wouldn’t accidentally hit any bystanders. 

His mother looked like she wanted to say something, but thought better of it, and ran towards the crowds along the beach. Some of the smarter people brought umbrellas and other shields to keep back the sand while it wasn’t being directly controlled by Shatterbird.

Wheatley Chestington was the sole Hero that Zaitana Cove had. He continued to fire up at what he was sure was Shatterbird, switching arms when he needed to reload. Every few seconds, he would take steps backwards. He was pretty certain he was doing absolutely nothing, he wasn’t sure Shatterbird had even noticed. Smoke rose from elsewhere in the city, getting ever closer. 

The streets had pretty much emptied of civilians by now, leaving only the corpses of the unlucky folks killed by the initial call. 

The glass wielding Villain was descending from the sky the next time he looked up. Not good for a blind cape running low on back-up plans. Sundance Kid readied his spare pistols, aiming them all at her. He let loose, firing shots like it was going out of style. The tinkling of glass and the smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils, but his arms seemed to be tracking something other than the main mass of glass. 

They were shooting down cutting blades of silicon that Shatterbird threw at him, but he wouldn’t find that out until later. Shatterbird was toying with the blind hero. She’d touched down on the road, and was focusing mainly on defending her body. Sundance Kid had seen better days. He was holding his sides, and blood was seeping out of his arms and legs. His frame was holding him up, and moving for him. Sidesteps, short hops, twirls. All to get out the way of her attacks. His mechanical arms were aiming and firing at her themselves, even though he clearly was not able to see. His eyes were directed at the ground.

Sundance Kid was fighting to retreat, not to kill, but he wasn’t doing very well at either. His revolvers were about to run out of ammunition, and he hadn’t finished the speedloaders yet. His next upgrade session wasn’t going to start until after he’d gotten back from a vacation.

They were almost onto the beach, so Sundance Kid did the most heroic thing he could think of. He emptied all his bullets at her and then turned tail and ran for the wooden pier’s relative safety. The first suggestion that something was wrong was when the number of guns firing dropped by one. 

He felt lighter. Sparks began to fly from the bisected arm, and it waved in the breeze like a stalk of wheat. Wheatley never did recover that gun, it was most likely still lying upon the sands of the Zaitana Recovery Zone. 

His visor was accounting for the extra wind, and his guns fired at the same time. The two bullets were aimed precisely by the basic intelligence system. Instead of trying for a precise shot, it was attempting a move that was programmed into it as a trick, a flashy shot that Wheatley had seen in movies. One bullet, right before the other, fired at a slight angle, so that when the first got blocked the second would bounce off at a different angle and land right in the defences of the S-class threat. 

All of this occured outside of the recognition of Wheatley, who was just focused on climbing up the wooden steps of the pier and not passing out from the pain. He noticed something had finally gone right when the beach's sand stopped trying to flay his legs and dropped back down to where it naturally stayed. 

It quieted down enough for him to hear his mother calling him from the end of the pier, at the docking for the boat. From farther back in the city came the voice of Crawler, the low rumbling laugh of a monster who knew nothing there could hurt him. 

Wheatley continued to stumble along, his guns stowing in the mechanical pack so his spare arms could prop him up on the pier's railing. 

Now alone, he pulled himself along the way slowly. A man's body had sprouted glass growths, right beneath a hotdog stand. A child was still holding an older woman's hand with an ice cream cone melting slowly into the boards. The strawberry cream was mixing with the red pool still expanding near the pair. 

The clinical, detached part of his mind registered that he was starting to experience the numb shock of blood loss.

Brenda Chestington was screaming for her son to hurry up, he was almost there, don't give up now. Her cries were falling upon deaf ears. What Wheatley hadn't realized was that a new pair of what looked like average people were slowly advancing along the pier behind him. 

An older man, dressed in casual slacks and flipping a butterfly knife. His bearded face was twisted into a cruel smile as he watched the injured Wheatley limp away. 

At his side was a younger girl, a twelve year old blonde with a cutesy smile and a bloodstained dress. She was holding a glowing red needle, not that Sundance Kid had noticed.

"What a trooper. Futile, but quite impressive," came the dulcet tones of Jack Slash, killer extraordinaire, "I do wonder what they feed them these days?" 

Bonesaw responded in the tone of the teacher's pet, waiting for a pat on the head, "I read in a news article that the average young adult survives on ready heat meals and a general diet of meat and two vegetables when they can get it! It sounds like a disgusting diet, all that oil."

The pair were catching up to stumbling little Wheatley. None of the parahumans were listening to the screaming woman by the boat. 

Jack Slash casually flipped open his knife, and used his particular abilities to extend the cutting blade out and flicked his wrist. 

Wheatley's right leg suddenly stung quite a lot, and he wasn't getting any feedback from the BalanceFrame there. Another small cut right above his buttocks, and the main computer in the backpack was knocked offline. He became aware of how much of the work the frame had been doing for him as he tripped over a knocked over plant pot and struggled to get back up, unable to get his legs under him. 

He also became aware of the people behind him when the man’s hand landed on his shoulder. He was spun around by the leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and he could only blurrily see the gruesome smile of his doom. If only he had more bullets in his guns, and the wherewithal to use them. The events of that day would have been much different. He always did freeze up when the bullies caught up to him.

Instead of heroics, he sat there petrified as Jack Slash moved his face around by the jaw. The villain was holding the knife to his neck as he monologued. 

“The Hero of… what is this place called? Nevermind. Where is your focus, boy? This won’t do at all,” said the famed murderer, and he pulled out a pair of honest to god wire-framed glasses, and put it on Wheatley’s face before continuing, “You managed to hurt my Shatterbird, little Hero. For that, I do have to make you pay. Just business, you see. I have to keep our reputation up. I’m getting old you know, and I don’t like Bonesaw experimenting on me. I’ll have to let her, now, if someone as objectively weak as you could take down a stronger member.” 

Bonesaw’s face lit up like a kid in a candy shop. She did a little happy dance.

“You’ll let me fix you guys again? Oh Jack, thank you thank you thank you! I’m going to have to celebrate!” 

The will to struggle came back to Wheatley as the two villains chattered above him. Jack Slash was slowly cutting open his nice blue T-shirt, and Bonesaw was leaning over to watch with the terrifying red needle getting ever closer and closer. He could only watch in abject despair, screaming out until Bonesaw stuffed a bloody rag in his mouth. Bonesaw hadn’t used her needle yet but… Jack Slash had used his knife to carve a bloody trail down his stomach. With quick, sharp, ever so precise cuts the monster in human flesh had carved the letter S onto his flesh along with a large 9. 

As his vision faded in and out, Jack Slash sat in front of him admiring his handiwork.

“You can go ahead and try your new vial, Bonesaw dear. Remember to let Mannequin know when he can swim back to shore.”

Bonesaw squealed and pushed her way into Wheatley’s personal comfort zone. She pinched a fold of his stomach, and leaned in with the needle prepped.

“This will only hurt a little bit, please tell me what you’re experiencing in as much detail as possible!” 

Wheatley never got a chance to experience that chemical first hand, as this was the chance for one bad man to do a good thing.

A beam of decaying black energy struck Bonesaw in the left arm, as Jack Slash leaned out of the way of it. Limping down the wooden boards of the Zaitana Cove Pier was the town’s newest villain and jailbird, Deathrey. He had affixed some planks of wood to his injured leg with a poorly tied bandage, and was firing his namesake blasts as fast as he could at the Slaughterhouse Nine members. His costume was tattered and burnt in places, and his hood was bloodstained.

The pair of villains dropped Wheatley and dove behind cover, as they narrowly avoided instant death. Bonesaw was silently cutting off her arm below the shoulder, as the skin of her forearm turned black like charcoal and faded off her body with the wind. 

“Get out of here, Hero! I’ll try and buy you some time,” Deathrey called to Wheatley, one survivor to another.

Jack Slash merely laughed at the display of heroics, flicking his knife out to attempt to cut through to the Blaster between sentences, “You won’t take long at all, little killer. You could have been one of us, but now you have to go. This town will have to be wiped off the map at this rate. No time for fancy messages. Can’t have witnesses letting anyone know that the Slaughterhouse Nine took this kind of damage.”

Wheatley had spent most of this time lolling in the arms of his brave, brave mother. She’d chanced certain death to drag her only son to the boat and what should have been safety. Neither of the Slaughterhouse Nine had noticed her pulling him away.

“Oh, my son. My precious boy. You’re going to be okay, we’ll get you away from here. You’ll heal. You’re okay. Focus on me Wheatley, don’t go to sleep, don’t-” 

\-----  
Wheatley awoke to the swaying of a ship on the open ocean. He was in the cabin of the cruiseliner, a darkened and very small room enclosing him. The window outside showed nothing but water. He could hear a strange growling outside his cabin door, and he was all alone. His torso had been bandaged but continued to sting, and the bandages were mostly red. He hadn’t yet realized that his mother was nowhere to be found, but the realization was coming slowly closer. Connections were forging between the information in his mind. 

He walked closer to the door, using the handholds to keep himself upright. Between his natural ineptitude and the swaying of the open ocean, he would never be able to walk on a ship. Not without his tinkertech. As he was about to open the door, he heard the slapping of bare feet on the corridor outside. Something was growling like a rabid animal, and charging his door.

\-----  
A/N: That chapter just kept coming, whoops. So much for short. The first interaction with the S9, and the main bulk of the Gunslinger backstory. Hope the chapter was enjoyable, and the S9 were decently in character. Thanks for reading, leave any thoughts you had please!


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